Wichita has always been a bowling town.  Ask just about any aspiring college bowler where they want to go to school and they'll likely tell you Wichita State.  There are a bunch of bowlers from the Wichita area who have gone on to join the Professional Bowlers Association and be successful.

Every year, thousands of league bowlers from across the country travel to compete in the USBC Open Championship.  This year a team from Wichita won the tournament in amazing fashion.  The team consisted of Chris Greene (Wichita), Jay Futrell (Derby), and Joe Keltner (Haysville)... along with Russ Wilson (Lawrence) and Thomas Ault (Oregon).  They are known as Team Tilt.

There were approximately 12,000 teams that competed in this year's tournament, which runs for months and ended last weekend.  Team Tilt bowled over the Memorial Day Weekend in Albuquerque, NM and posted a team score of 3374, which they knew took the lead.  There would be six weeks remaining, however, before the end of the tournament and many of the good teams often don't bowl the tournament until the final weeks.

"We were pretty excited just to take the lead," says Greene as he spoke to me Saturday night.  "You only have three games.  You get one shot at it every year.  When we left, we felt like we put up a good score."

Finally, after six long weeks of waiting, the final squads took to the lanes in Albuquerque last weekend.

"It was pretty nerve-wracking," Greene told me.  "We were checking the Internet five, six, seven times a day to see if anyone had beaten us."

After the scores were tallied and all of the bowling was complete, Team Tilt walked away with the USBC team title this year and a fat paycheck of $35,000.  A pretty amazing feat for five young guys, none of whom bowl professionally.  Plus, Futrell was the only bowler out of more than 60,000 to post a 700 series in all of the events... doubles, singles, and team.

"We didn't really think about winning," says Greene.  "Sure, it was our goal.  We know we're a team that is capable of doing it, but it's just so hard going into it.  We weren't even going to buy our team picture, but Jay said beforehand, 'I'm going to buy our team picture since we're going to win this thing.'  That was before we even bowled," said Greene, laughing.

That joke turned out to be the truth.  And now Jay Futrell has the only picture of the best bowling team in the country.  The coveted USBC title is something that the young teammates will never forget.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing," Greene explains.  "Seeing the Eagle next to my name next year, that's when it'll probably hit me."